"This Charlotte Gray woman," said Sir Oliver, when Cannerley had settled down.
"I gather you know her."
"Yes," said Cannerley eagerly.
"I put her on to G Section."
"Have you kept in touch?" It was a favourite phrase.
"Certainly."
Sir Oliver nodded.
"You remember Fowler, the crooked little businessman I told you about?"
"The chap who's our way into G Section?"
"Exactly. Well, he's managed to get me a copy of their psychological reports on this Gray female. They're rather good. Some suspicion of childhood upsets. Otherwise clear-thinking, resourceful. Determined."
"Oh, yes," said Cannerley.
"She's determined all right, but she's set on the wrong thing. She's got some fixation about France."
Sir Oliver nodded.
"What do you know about her boyfriend?"
"He's an ex-Spitfire pilot," said Cannerley.
"Like a lot of those Battle of Britain chaps he's a pretty useless case.
He was on some ludicrous suicide mission over Dieppe or Le Havre in the spring.
The R.A.F really are incredible."
"But the girl's keen?"
"Absolutely besotted, according to my inquiries. She was certainly resistant to other forms of male charm."
"I see." Sir Oliver inhaled deeply and Cannerley heard the rattle of mucus behind his nose.
"He's gone missing over France. He was in a Lysander. He appears to have had an accident."
"Is he alive?" said Cannerley.
"We don't know. The point is that this Gray woman is likely to be sent over to Fowler's section. That's the rumour, anyway."
"From Fowler?"
Sir Oliver nodded.
"But surely she's not up to being an agent?" said Cannerley.
"God, no, she'll go as what G Section charmingly calls a " courier".
She has to deliver an agent to his destination, then run a little errand of her own."
"Rather like a fany at home."
"Exactly. Be alert. Keep her seams straight. Not stall the car.
Apparently the agent needs an escort because his French isn't up to it."
"Can't they find enough French speakers?"
"Apparently not. Remarkable, isn't it? They say it's all right when he's among friends, but they don't want to risk him talking to security and so on."
Sir Oliver paused as a Spanish waiter came over and refilled his after-lunch coffee cup.
"Anyway," he said, when the waiter had disappeared, "I wondered if this missing airman might work to our advantage."
"I'm not quite with you."
Sir Oliver spooned some of the gritty coffee sugar into his small white cup and stirred it briskly.
"I'm not sure there's anything to be " with" yet."
"I see." Cannerley felt flattered to have been privy, at such an early stage, to Sir Oliver's famously intricate thought processes.
"But is there anything you'd like me to do?"
"Yes. The usual thing."
"Keep in touch."
"Exactly."
Cannerley, seeing that Sir Oliver could not be bothered to extend the conversation with smaller talk, made his way out into Pall Mall. As he stood waiting for a taxi, he felt an oppressive melancholy descend.
Something was not right. Was it the girl? He envied the airman, but he did not feel unduly concerned for her. No, it was something to do with Sir Oliver that had unsettled him.
A taxi stopped.
"Ormonde Gate," said Cannerley through the window, but once inside he leaned forward and tapped the glass.
"I'm sorry.
I've changed my mind. Westminster Hospital."
Charlotte set off for the New Forest on the train with Marigold Davies.
In her handbag was the note Gregory had left by her bed on the last night she had seen him, and a letter from his squadron leader.
Dear Miss. Gray, Further to our telephone conversation today I am writing to confirm that while we have received no news of Flt lt Gregory since he left on a mission some time ago we have no reason to believe the worst.
Although we are a standard R.A.F squadron independent of other organisations albeit working in liaison with other services you will no doubt appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose details of the flight, either with regard to its destination or in respect of its operational purpose. I can tell you that Flt lt Gregory is an extremely able pilot and a patriotic officer with a proper sense of duty. My own belief is that for any one of a number of possible operational reasons he was unable to execute the full purpose of his mission but that he will make every endeavour to contact us when it is safe and prudent for him to do so.
He will be officially posted "Missing' but I'm sure you have every faith in him, as most assuredly do his colleagues.
Yours sincerely, Allan Wetherby, Squadron Leader On the telephone, Wetherby had told her 'strictly between ourselves' that the most likely explanation was that the man Gregory was supposed to pick up had not been there. Without the agent or the support of his network, Gregory would have been unable to refuel and therefore obliged to 'make his own arrangements'. Charlotte pictured him begging petrol from a farmer in his dreadful French and finding himself reported to the Vichy authorities; she tried to develop this picture in her mind because the only alternative was to believe that he was already dead.
She told Marigold nothing of her worries as the train headed out into Surrey.
She had confided in Daisy, and that was enough. Now she would complete her training with the greatest assiduity, and when it was finished she would go to France and find him.
Security, recognition, interrogation and security. That, the intelligence officer running the course told them with a smirk at his witty repetition, was what Group D was all about. Charlotte and Marigold were among only six women on the course; they sat next to each other and learned to identify every German plane and badge and rank and regiment.
Vaguer but more important were the instructions for recognising German counter-intelligence officers, the Abwehr and their colleagues, of whom there were unknown numbers in France- presumed standing at station ticket barriers, sitting in cafes, idly making bogus calls from public telephone boxes. In her state of stunned concentration Charlotte committed every detail to memory and entered mistake-free test papers when required.
A grave, actorish man in his sixties gave them practical hints on looking ordinary and natural. It was no use knowing a cover story and giving away nothing under interrogation, he told them; they had to look at all times like people who didn't even have a cover story.
Charlotte shared a bedroom with Marigold and a young woman called Liliane, whose mother was French. She took the course more lightly than the other two, and claimed that when she first went to Scotland it was in answer to an advertisement for bilingual secretaries; the first time she realised she was not being groomed to be a typist was when they offered to instruct her in silent killing.
The three of them were joined by three men for an exercise in interrogation.
They were told to prepare a cover story giving details not only of assumed identities but of the precise way in which they had all passed the four hours of the previous afternoon, in the course of which a local train had been derailed. Each was then to be interrogated separately.
Charlotte was woken at three in the morning by a torch being shone in her face, and was taken down by an orderly to the billiard room at the back of the house, where two officers were waiting, dressed in SS uniform. One was the course commander, one was a man she had never seen before. The presence of a senior uniformed fany made Charlotte wonder if this was to be a naked interrogation, like the one Marigold had described. The two men had either not heard of or had disregarded the idea that one interrogator should abuse and one cajole: they both attacked her from the start, standing close, using their physical size to intimidate her. Charlotte, drawn from her deep sleep, pale and puffy-eyed, her pink dressing gown drawn tight about her, found all the details of her learned story undisturbed and was able to repeat them with the mental precision that she always had on first waking.
They tried to destabilise her by claiming other members of her group had given different accounts of how they had passed the afternoon, but Charlotte told them they must have been mistaken. She was sure the self-taught mnemonic tricks that had helped her pass school tests as a girl were still working.
After two hours they let her go. She climbed back up the broad shiny staircase and went along the corridor to her room. She turned the door handle, gently, so as not to wake the others, and walked across the linocovered floor, shedding her dressing gown as she went. The bed springs made no noise as she slipped beneath the blanket and prepared to resume her interrupted sleep.
Her mind was too full. It was a warm night, and the curtain had been drawn back a little to allow any breeze to enter through the open window.
She had found the early parts of her training impossible and absurd, but her attitude had changed: it now seemed urgent and serious, and even the sight of two Englishmen dressed up in Nazi uniform did not strike her as ridiculous.
These pantomimes and costumes, these colours of allegiance, were tokens of a deadly moral order. She was not fooled by their superficial absurdity: British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but, as German philosophers long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular.
She thought of France under darkness. It was hard to imagine how this country which in her first visits was still so harrowingly proud of itself, intoning the word Verdun like a muttered prayer, could so utterly have lost the thread that connected it to the innocent glory of Rheims and Proust's Combray and Louveciennes, the village the Impressionist painters had made seem essential. There was this sense, on a grand scale, of national breakdown, and next to it was the loss of continuity in her own small life.
She felt that the outcome of the one depended on the other; that only if France could find itself again, could she hope to reconnect her own future to the lost happiness of her past.
More urgent than this hope was the need to get herself as soon as possible to Clermont Ferrand: to track down Monsieur Chollet in his garage and see if Gregory had called; and, if not, to use whatever method her cunning and determination could devise to go out in the dark and find him.
The curtain blew back a few inches from the window as the hoped-for breeze rustled through; and in the revealed slit of sky she saw a clouded moon.
Charlotte crescent, Charlotte full... She closed her dry eyes and felt her lips come inwards in a narrow line. She saw his face. Don't worry, my love, don't worry, I'm coming to get you.
PART TWO
Summer 1942
14
Andre Duguay was running down an overgrown alley between two fields.
It was a short cut his mother had forbidden him to take for fear of the adders thought to nest in the long grass, but Andre was in a hurry. The muscles in his fatless thighs slid up and down beneath the rim of his shorts; his calves, on which the baby whiteness of his skin was acquiring a dim honey- coloured gloss in the course of the summer, propelled him. bounding over wiry bramble traps, the ruts of long-dried mud, the sleeping serpents.
When he arrived at the road, panting, he hesitated for a moment. Left, right He was still too young to know the difference, but he knew the school was that way, up the hill: his route must therefore be towards the woods. He followed the road for ten minutes, walking to regain his breath, then running a little to make up time. Eventually, he saw the path he recognised and heard the frenzied barking of a German shepherd dog as the sound of his first footfall reached the farmyard. Andre walked cautiously nearer. Often his father had told him what to do when confronted by dogs, but still he had the urge to stroke them: in the rough diagram of his understanding, animals were with children against an adult "world of rules and obligations. He stood still, offered the back of his hand to the dog and made no move to cross its territory until the animal backed off, its hairy tail swishing, its growls diminishing to a provisional acceptance.
Andre climbed the steps on the outside of one of the neglected outbuildings.
A door was open to a gloomy room with a stone sink in one corner. A purple-faced woman in a headscarf, known to Andre only as Marion's mamie, was pouring fat from a pan over the top of a duck's leg in a glass jar. She looked up as Andre stood hesitantly in the doorway and let out a greeting in the cracked accent of the region, which Andre was too shy to return. The old woman continued with her greasy work, sealing the bottle with a rubber washer and a glass top. Andre looked nervously round the room, in which three ducks in different stages of dismemberment lay on a long dirty table and a row of blackened pans hung from a beam. Marion's mamie wiped her hands down the front of her apron, exchanging the fresh fat for accumulated layers of older lard transferred from the cloth to her sliding palms.
"Have you come for some eggs?" She rolled across the room like an old sailor, the heel of her hand stuck into the flesh above her hip.
"Yes." Andre's voice had the clarity of a treble bell, especially when he was unsure of himself.
"Please," he remembered.
"I can only let you have four. Have you got the money?"
Andre took a twist of paper from the pocket of his shorts and handed it to her. The old woman opened it and counted the coins inside. She nodded. "I'll put them in a paper bag for you. Don't drop them, will you?"
Andre shook his head vigorously, opening his eyes and pulling his lower lip down in a self-mocking grimace. Eggs were vital.
He went gently down the steps, the memory of first negotiating stairs on all fours still fresh in his mind often, when no one was looking, he still went up the stairs at home like a dog and moved off across the farmyard, holding the paper bag tight.
"Thank you," his father's absent tones prompted him to call in his clear voice, setting off a renewed spasm of barking.
The church spire of Lavaurette came into view as Andre rejoined the road.
His mother had told him the whole excursion would take about an hour, and had smiled impatiently when he asked her, "Is that a long time?"
Andre clutched the eggs by the top of the twisted paper bag: both his parents had brought him to the edge of tears in their eagerness to impress on him how important it was that the goods came home intact.
Lavaurette was a place that would not die. In the waiting room at the hotel de ville were photographs from the nineteenth century, and there was one that showed the main street in 1910, before the cataclysm.
Small enterprises spilled in black and white from the front rooms of almost every house: tobacconist, carpenter, draper, coiffeur, greengrocer. Young and middle-aged men leaned against doorways, smoking; out of the camera's narrow angle they were working- in the fields, in the giant stone quarry a bicycle ride to the south and in the factory just outside the village. And then there were no men any more, there was only a crudely carved Marianne whose chiselled face, designed to show triumph, looked as though it were blinded by the list of names of the dead that rambled on, up and down the stone pedestal at her feet, through families, through streets, through the ribs and lungs of Lavaurette.
In the years since the Great War it had declined from the character and status of a small town to that of an overgrown village. The main structures were still there: the hotel de ville was an ambitious Second Empire building with fine tiled eaves; there was a cobbled square in front of it with a neoclassical post office and stern municipal buildings. A plane-flanked avenue led to the railway station, a place of captured somnolence with faded lettering on cream plaster walls; there was a goods siding with rusted buffers and two platforms for the passenger trains that eventually connected their handful of travellers to the main lines for Bordeaux and Clermont Ferrand. The journey to Clermont was the same as it had been since the line opened in 1882, but the trip to Bordeaux now involved crossing the demarcation line into the Occupied Zone. On the train there were inspections of documents, and beneath the great tubular vaults of Bordeaux Stjean there were German troops. How well behaved they were, it was agreed by all the travellers: how disciplined, polite and neatly dressed.
Although there now existed a new generation of twenty-year-old men, Lavaurette had for many years depended on the vigour of its women: Mlle Cariteau, who ran the post office, a tall, strong-jawed woman of forty whose efficiency was marked by a virile manner and a big, white-toothed smile, a natural wife they said, with no men available in her generation to marry; or Madame Galliot, widowed in the war and left with a baby daughter, whose ironmongery served as a meeting place for the other women of Lavaurette who were unwelcome in the male atmosphere of the Cafe du Centre.
Whatever the dramatic nature of its changes and whatever the violent reasons for them, Lavaurette retained in the eyes of casual visitors a sense of continuity with more innocent days- a time before the holocaust, when such a village might have seemed as close to paradise as anything that humans had contrived. It certainly, at least, looked old-fashioned, with its three squares, its narrow shuttered streets and its hard-retained dignity. Far enough south to have hot summers, it was sufficiently northern to be wholly French, with no trace of Spain, Liguria or the Languedoc. With a shrinking population, there had been no need to build new houses; and while the soil of the surrounding farmland varied in quality, it had, until the Occupier's ravening expropriations, been good enough to supply an ample market on Saturday mornings; the priest was still respected and his church was full.
It was impossible to tell if everything was really lost, because so much seemed to carry on unharmed.
Andre came to the bottom of the Avenue Gambetta, where he received a wave of greeting from the butcher. Monsieur Gastinel, Lavaurette's only self-proclaimed Gaullist, a man whose low-grade sausages, inventive cuts of would-be steak and dishes of prepared offal were available more readily to those who, like him, had been inspired by General de Gaulle's passionate broadcast from London, in which he had claimed that the fight for France went on and that only a battle, not a war, was lost. A scrap of lamb breast or a spoonful of veal muzzle in brine would sometimes find its way into the rationed bags of those who denied the legitimacy of Vichy and believed that the true spirit of the Republic was now in exile overseas.
Whatever the business of the other shops, there were hardly any goods on display; the only thing of which there seemed an abundance was portraits of Marshal Petain. His wise and kindly face stared out on to the street, mounted, framed, sometimes surrounded by swathes of crimson velvet or perched victorious on a marble plinth. The snowy moustache and the saviour's tolerant eyes said: we went wrong and we are being taught a lesson; we cannot say how long this improving penance must last; we brought this upon ourselves and now we must see the error of our ways.
The older villagers remembered that Petain had once been the hero of France, when he had seen off the Germans at the Battle of Verdun in 1916 and been the first leader to show a concern for his men's lives. His ramshackle government of 1940, which had voted to dissolve the republic and grant itself full powers, was now the only haven in the storm. The Marshal was a good man, they said; and in any case the people of Lavaurette had nowhere else to turn.
Andre kicked a flinty stone along the edge of the road. When he got home he would go out into the garden with his younger brother Jacob and continue to excavate the small trench beneath the chestnut tree which served as a moat to the castle they were building with old boxes. Andre was almost seven, Jacob only four, but their mother treated them alike.
Having borne them, fed them, cleaned them, she could not break the bond of touch. Though Andre could easily dress himself she liked to help him, so that she could feel the packed little muscles beneath his skin. She ran her hands through his black hair and felt the soft spokes of it trickle out over the webs between her fingers.
Before going to bed herself, she still crept into Andre's room and kissed every part of him when he slept naked in the summer, his left arm flung back behind his head, his right arm hanging limp, his golden skin tingling soft beneath her lips, his low breathing undisturbed by her self-indulgence.
Andre pushed open the door to Madame Galliot's ironmongery and went shyly across the scrubbed boards up to the counter. He felt in his pocket for the second twist of paper his mother had given him, with which he was supposed to buy candles. Half a dozen people were standing round the counter, talking loudly, preventing him from catching Madame Galliot's eye.
"I think it's long overdue," Madame Galliot was saying.
"The Marshal's the first person who's had the courage to grasp the nettle, that's all. For years they've been undermining us, keeping all the best jobs to themselves, swindling proper French people. The day when they said no Jew should be a school teacher any more, that was the best day we've seen round here for a long, long time."
Andre waited his turn. The shop smelled of coir matting, camphor and galvanised buckets. Behind Madame Galliot's indignantly nodding head was a pointed step ladder she used for fetching down the graded boxes of washers and nails from the top shelf. The shaved floorboards led down the interior of the shop into a secondary room, less pungent, stacked with pans, casseroles, stiff yard brooms and long shelves full of crockery with sets of china laid out round cavernous lidded soup tureens.
"I didn't know Duguay was one of them," said an old man called Roudil.
"He seemed like a nice enough type. He was no trouble to anyone and I don't think his business was dishonest."
"Oh, but the mother, though. A typical Israelite," said Madame Galliot.
"They changed their name to Duguay to take us all in."
Hearing his family name, Andre found the courage to speak. The group of people at the counter split apart to let him in and he walked forward, holding up his money.
"Have you any candles, please?"
Madame Galliot's rolling eloquence came to a halt. Her hands flew up to the side of her head, where they pushed nervously at the orange hair that was escaping from its net. She settled her spectacles and gave a turkey-like cluck as she bent down to open a cupboard behind her.
There was silence among the other five adults, who anxiously avoided looking at one another, or at the boy. Roudil coughed and ran his hand over Andre's hair.
"All right, young man? Off to play now, are you?"
"Yes. I'm going home." Seeing the old man's worried but kind expression, Andre was bold enough to add: "I'm building this castle with my brother.
From old boxes. My father's helping."
"That's nice, then," said Roudil.
"A castle."
Silence returned, apart from the sound of feet shuffling on the splintery floor. Madame Galliot handed Andre the packet of candles and took his coins.
She raised them close to her face to count them out.
"You owe me..." She hesitated.
"Tell your parents..." She paused and looked at her feet; then, with a great effort, as though moving into unknown commercial territory, she said, "You can owe me the rest."
"Thank you. Goodbye, Madame."
The adults watched in silence as the boy swung the door closed, causing the bell to jangle briefly, then started to skip up the street.
Andre had a natural, loose-limbed action. His feel slithered over the ground with a rhythmic rustle, like wire brushes going over a snare drum. Skipping tired him no more than walking; it was his natural means of going up the hill towards his parents' house in the street behind the square. It was time for him to eat and drink, and he knew his mother would have something ready for him. She had tried to explain to him that it was difficult, these days, to give the children enough food, let alone the things they used to like. Andre didn't understand the reasons for this shortage, and in any case his mother always used to come up with something.
The front door of the house was closed, which was unusual. Andre stood on tiptoe and reached up for the knocker. As he did so he saw that a star had been painted on the door. Some dribbles of yellow paint ran from the swiftly daubed diagonals.
He banged on the door again, but there was no answer from inside. His mother had often told him that if he should ever return and find no one there he was to go next door to Madame Redon and ask if he could wait in her house.
With the eggs and the candles still clutched in his hand, Andre went through to the old widow's house and again raised his small fist. He saw a movement through the half-open window on the first floor, but no one came. It was very odd. If Madame Redon was in the house, why would she not answer the door?
Andre found his happy poise begin to crack. Just as his mother still liked to treat him as a baby, still wanted him physically attached to her, so in a way he felt that the things he could do the errands, the hesitant reading - were only fragile accomplishments, and that the real bases of his world were still panic and helplessness. He sat on the step of his own family's house and felt tears coming to his eyes.
"You'd better come with me." The voice seemed to be in his head almost at once; in his loss of control, Andre had no sense of the passage of time.
He looked up through red eyes and saw a youngish man hold out his hand.
He did not know the man, though he had seen him in the village.
"My name is Julien. I'll look after you."
Andre reached out his hand and felt the man take it; some order returned to his existence.
"What's happened? Where's my mother?"
The young man did not answer; he looked afraid. Andre, seeing that something had happened which was beyond the power even of a friendly adult to explain, and seeing that it had happened to his parents, began to sob.
"What is it? Where is she? Where is she?"
The waiting room of the hotel de ville was filled with bewildered people, some sitting on the benches along the wall, some crowding up to the desk behind which a short-tempered clerk was trying to answer their questions.
Their inquiries were to do with obtaining permits or papers within the mayor's gift permission to leave building waste in a disused quarry, access to food coupons, the right to travel. The room had the smell of bodies confined for too long.
Julien Levade held Andre's hand tightly as he forced his way to the front of the crowd. Resistance to him initially came in the form of looks and closed ranks; then, when it was clear he was paying no attention, women began to remonstrate with him.
Julien, who was a reasonable man, explained to them that a boy had lost his parents, that his errand was more urgent than theirs.
"I apologise, Madame, please excuse me. It's not for me, you understand, it's for the child. See how upset he is."
They looked. Andre had never been in the hotel de ville before; its vaulted hall, its marble stairs and now its room of bewildering officialdom had frightened him. He held more tightly to the hand of the strange man, hoping he would find a thread of order that would restore things to their proper place. The man seemed to think that the clerk would know where his mother was and Andre had no reason to think otherwise. Perhaps she was somewhere behind the counter, in a room at the back of the building. Since she was so powerful and had alone explained the world to him, he could not imagine how she might allow anything bad to happen to herself.
"I don't care what the matter is, you can't just push your way to the front."
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